Candy on Quiverful, Sex and Procreation

Apparently Candy has been taking some flack for her illogical and hard to follow views on procreation and sexuality. Her latest post on Welcome to Keeping The Home regarding "Quiverfull, Sex, Procreation" was an attempt to clarify but it still seems a little muddled to me.

She starts out with Psalm 127:

Psalm 127
1Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.
2It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.
3Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
4As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth.
5Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

Verse one sets the tone for the whole Psalm - 'Except the LORD build...' We have people today with big, beautiful houses, but the Lord was not with them in building their homes. Their homes are not blessed. Cities and areas where the LORD is not allowed to reign lose blessings. (Thank God Christ will soon come back and reign.) It is not good to stay up late, and get up early, else you are not taking the sleep and rest that God desires for you. Children are 'an heritage of the LORD' if 'the LORD build the house.' Certainly there are pagan families who have very large families; I've met some. Was the Lord in that? There are also very large Christian families, where the parents are like baby-making factories, yet there is no joy, no rest, and utter turmoil in their family life. Did THEY decide to have child after child after child after child without the Lord's being in it?

There are a couple of telling things in here. First of all I believe and I always thought other Christians believed this as well, that only God can knit a child in the womb and only God creates and gives a soul. Whenever a Baby is made, God is in it. Even a baby conceived from rape is a child created and loved by God.

Secondly, utter turmoil and lack of rest does not mean that a family is not Godly, or unhappy or that God isn't with them. Everyone knows how much Candy values orderliness and cleanliness. That's great. God bless her for that. But it doesn't mean that other moms and dads who struggle with that are somehow less Godly. Good housekeeping can sometimes, in my opinion, become its own false idol.

Certainly baby-making is not 100% up to God, else what are non-Christians doing having babies, with some of those poor babies being abused? 

While I agree that parents co-participate with God in baby making I reiterate that God is definitely 100% involved with each and every conception.

God gave us free will in all aspects in our lives, and that includes procreation. 

That is absolutely true and with free will comes responsibility. But it also means that not every choice we make is good, holy and pleasing to God. It simply means that He allows us to have free will.  Some choices have consequences and most times God lets us suffer with them.

Let's get something straight - there are not these eternal, disembodied spririts floating around hoping that you have a baby so that that spirit can have a life.

Very True. God makes each individual soul separately for each new life conceived.  Prior to that, each of us was just a thought in the mind of God. 

That's not how it works. NOT having children is NOT a sin! We are not 'preventing a life that could have been' by deciding to not have children.

Actually, the Catholic church comes very close to teaching this same thing.  Children are a gift from God and God loves to bless with life and bless abundantly!  But when parents discern that they are not in a position to accept a new life or must postpone a pregnancy the church teaches that it must be for a serious matter. The purpose of marriage is to raise up Godly offspring.  To forgo conceiving and raising up Godly children is not something to be taken lightly.

However when one has children when they hear the still, small voice of the Lord, then when they produce seed after their own kind, they know 'the LORD built the house.' All four of my children are here, because my husband and I both felt that God wanted us to have each child. Every conception was God-led.

This in my opinion is simply Candy theology and I wouldn't be surprised if she ticks off a lot of people who read it.  "The Lord built the house" whether one hears a little voice or not, or if a baby is simply conceived after a romantic Saturday night or by a couple who thought they were past conceiving.  I think Candy is trying to say here that only planned children from a "still small voice" are conceived of the Lord?  And that of course is ridiculous.


Then we have a paragraph that falls under the TMI department, but it sounds to me that it's up to Eric whether conception occurs or not because Onanism is a guy thing.  And if Candy isn't on board with that then it couldn't  possibly be from God.  It's a very twisted piece of logic.

Someone commented on one of my quiverfull posts, and said that she knew the Lord wanted her to have three children. She had her three, and when she and her husband tried to have more, it was miscarriage after miscarriage. I believe this woman and her husband were hearing from the Lord as well. They have three beautiful children.

This part blows me away.  I am the mother of a stillborn son, born when I was 42.  I could have taken, and indeed I think that is the message of the culture that that was my cue to stop having babies and being open to new life.  We went on to conceive at age 45 and have a beautiful baby girl that I have way too many pictures of in my Flickr account.  Miscarried and stillborn children are still part of God's plan for us.  Those little souls pray for us and are there to greet us in the end.  I know of a woman who had ten miscarriages and ten live births inbetween.  A miscarriage or stillbirth isn't necessarily a punishment, or a call to not be open to the gift of new life.

I'm an only child, and I can guarantee you that all by myself I filled my parents' quiver! :-P

... no comment.


Sex is NOT purely for procreation.

Sex is not purley for recreation and pleasure either.  The Catholic church teaches that they are entertwined and that it is sinful to deliberately separate one from the other and why the church calls contraception intrisically evil as well as prohibiting certain fertility treatments. 

Other links and articles on the topic in my del.icio.us files.

Candy on family planning.

Update below!!

Last week Candy wrote:

Welcome to Keeping The Home: "Thursday, October 29, 2009
Quiverfull, etc.

As for the biblical perspective - how many children is each family to have? Certainly it is not literally a quiver, or each godly person in the Bible should have had 12 children, but most of them did not. We are to be fruitful and multiply. Some families (such as mine, when I was a child) only have one child. I was a miracle child. My parents tried for several years before I finally came along, and I was the last and only. 'Fruitful' is relative to each family.

I read several papers on this a few years ago.  The "quiver" is the holder full of arrows that an archer carries with him as he goes into battle.  Clearly from the warrior aspect, it is much better to face down the enemy with a lot of arrows in  your quiver than not.  An archer with only a few arrows better sure be a good shot!

The verse that everyone gets so riled up about is from Psalm 127 and goes:
 ³Behold, ^(F)children are a gift of the LORD,
         The ^(G)fruit of the womb is a reward.
    ⁴Like arrows in the hand of a ^(H)warrior,
         So are the children of one's youth.
    ⁵How ^(I)blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them;
         ^(J)They will not be ashamed
         When they ^(K)speak with their enemies ^(L)in the gate.


A warrior would be blessed to reach back and find yet another arrow so that he could take his shot.   The writer is making an analogy between that and how blessed is each child.  I can't imagine a warrior wanting to go into battle demanding to have only a limited number of arrows - I'm pretty sure the Psalm writer would scratch his head at that type of thinking as well.

Candy goes on:

Birth control - The Bible is clear on not murdering babies. After that, the only thing we see of birth control is where a guy spilt his seed on the ground. However, that seed-spilling was not what was condemned, but the fact that he was commanded, by law, to produce seed with his new wife, to raise up a child in his dead brother's name. That was Old Covenant law, and we are not under that now. Even if we were, that instance, in actuality, had little to do with birth control; it had to do with being disobedient to God's law."

Well that guy's name was Onan and that verse was understood pretty universally to indicate a condemnation of contraception until 1930.  I wrote about Poor Onan a few years ago. This seems like a good time to bring it here.  Brian Harrison the other of The Sin of Onan Revisted up made 5 points that I find pro-contraception Christians tend to overlook when waving this verse away:



1. Indeed, a further problem faces this conventional modern reading of the passage. If simple refusal to give legal offspring to his deceased brother were, according to Genesis 38, Onan's only offence, it seems extremely unlikely that the text would have spelt out the crass physical details of his contraceptive act (cf. v. 9). The delicacy and modesty of devout ancient Hebrews in referring to morally upright sexual activity helps us to see this. As is well-known, Scripture always refers to licit (married) intercourse only in an oblique way: "going in to" one's wife, (i.e., entering her tent or bedchamber, cf. vv. 8 and 9 in the Genesis text cited above, as well as Gen. 6: 4; II Sam. 16: 22; I Chron. 23: 7) or "knowing" one's spouse (e.g., Gen. 4: 17; Luke 1: 34). When the language becomes somewhat more explicit - "lying with" someone, or "uncovering [his/her] nakedness" - the reference is without exception to sinful, shameful sexual acts. And apart from the verse we are considering, the Bible's only fully explicit mention of a genital act (the voluntary emission of seed) is in a prophetical and allegorical context wherein Israel's infidelity to Yahweh is being denounced scathingly in terms of the shameless lust of a harlot (Ez. 23: 20).

2.Was Onan perhaps slain merely for refusing to give offspring to his deceased brother's wife, as most contemporary exegetes maintain? In answering these questions one must take cognizance of the following significant fact: the penalty subsequently laid down in the law of Moses for a simple refusal to comply with the levirate marriage precept was only a relatively mild public humiliation in the form of a brief ceremony of indignation. The childless widow, in the presence of the town elders, was authorized to remove her uncooperative brother-in-law's sandal and spit in his face for his refusal to marry her. He was then supposed to receive an uncomplimentary nick-name - "the Unshod." But since he nonetheless became sole owner of his deceased brother's house and goods, it is evident that his offence was scarcely considered a serious or criminal one - much less one deserving of death. Death, however, is precisely what Onan deserved, according to Genesis. It follows that those who say his only offence was infringement of the levirate marriage custom need to explain why such an offence was punished by the Lord so much more drastically in the case of Onan than than it subsequently was under the Mosaic law. If anything, we would tend to expect the contrary: i.e., that after the law was formalized as part of the Deuteronomic code its violation might be chastised more severely than before, not more mildly. Indeed, while it is clear from the Genesis narrative that the practice of levirate marriage already existed in Onan's time, there is no biblical evidence that he would have been conscious of any divine precept to observe that practice. This problem seems to have been simply ignored, rather than confronted, by those exegetes who cannot or will not see in this passage any Scriptural foundation for the orthodox Judæo-Christian doctrine against masturbation and contraception and unnatural intercourse between a man and woman, is not exactly a pleasant theme to write about.

3.It should be remembered also that we are here dealing here with a culture which so abhorred that other form of "wasting the seed" - the homosexual act - that it prescribed the death penalty for this offence. In the light of this and the other factors we have considered, I submit that it would be not only exegetically unwarranted, but quite anachronistic, to suggest that the Genesis author, in line with the 'political correctness' of late twentieth-century Western liberalism, would have taken a relaxed, indulgent view of Onan's method of preventing conception - his "spill[ing] the seed on the ground." We should note also the parallel between the description of homosexual acts as a "wicked" or "abominable" thing in the Leviticus texts and the similar qualification of what Onan did in Genesis 38: 10.

4. Moreover, in the view of revisionist exegetes, Onan's sin is presented here as being essentially one of omission. We are asked to believe that, according to Genesis, Onan committed no sinful act; rather, that his sin was to refrain from acting appropriately toward his deceased brother because of some sort of selfish interior disposition. But why, in that case, does the text describe Onan's sin as a positive action ("he did a detestable thing")? Coming directly after the author has mentioned what is certainly an outward act (i.e., "spilling the seed"), these words in v. 10 plainly indicate a causal link between that sexual act as such and the wrath and punishment of God.

After all, it is not as if the Old Testament vocabulary was lacking in concepts or words to express sins of interior attitude, when that is the kind of sin the authors had in mind. The "heart" of man - whether righteous or wicked - is a rich and important term of moral reference in Hebrew anthropology, and to the extent that Onan's fault was indeed this siof omission, such lack of piety toward his dead brother would have been an example of what the Israelites called "hardness of heart" (cf. Ex. 7: 13, 22; 8:15; Ps 95:7f), perhaps motivated at bottom by personal vanity (not wanting to father any child who would not be legally his), or even by that sheer covetousness for his brother's property which was forbidden in the Tenth Commandment and in numerous other Old Testament passages.

Once again, however, we must ask what evidence there is that this degree of "hardness of heart" would have been seen in Onan's time as sufficient to merit death. If today's revisionist exegetes are right in claiming that "spilling the seed on the ground" is not, per se, censured in this text, it would follow that even if Onan had simply declined to marry Tamar and so abstained from intimacy of any kind with her, this complete abstinence would have been viewed by the Genesis author as no less offensive to God than the course of action which Onan chose in reality - and which earned him a divine death sentence! But we have already pointed out that such a conclusion leaves unexplained the relative leniency of Deuteronomy 25 in penalizing such offences against the levirate marriage custom.

On the other hand if, as Judæo-Christian tradition has always insisted, "wasting the seed" by intrinsically sterile types of genital action violates that natural law to which all men, Jew and Gentile alike, have always had access by virtue of their very humanness, (cf. Rom. 1: 26-27; 2: 14), this will explain perfectly why Onan's sexual action in itself would be presented in Scripture as meriting a most severe divine judgment: it was a perverted act - one of life-suppressing lust. Indeed, over and above its prohibition by natural law, such deliberately sterilized pleasure-seeking could well have been discerned as a form of contravening one of the few divine precepts which already in that pre-Sinai tradition had been solemnly revealed - and repeated - in positive, verbal form: "Increase and multiply" (Gen. 1: 27-28; 9: 1).

5.until the early years of this century, when some exegetes began to approach the text with preconceptions deriving from the sexual decadence of modern Western culture and its exaggerated concern for 'over-population.' Sad to say, these preconceptions have since become entrenched as a new exegetical 'orthodoxy' which can no longer see even a trace of indignation in this passage of Scripture against intrinsically sterile forms of genital activity as such.


******************
Updated November 4, 2009

Today Candy writes:

I am quiverful, but not of the quiverful movement. I am biblically quiverful - meaning that my quiver is full. Do I want more children? Sure, but I'm fine not having anymore, either. It's not just up to me. It's also up to my husband and God, so I am very happy either way. Do I practice birth control? We do not utilize any internal or external means, nor do we abstain when I ovulate (that would be torture). Instead, we are just "careful." I've never had an "accidental" conception from being "careful," but if I ever do, that is a-okay.

Um... if it's up to her husband, and they aren't using any internal or external contraceptive and they don't abstain but are just "careful" then I think Candy should get to know "that guy spilt his seed on the ground" because it sounds as if they are practicing Onanism. Candy defended that this way:However, that seed-spilling was not what was condemned, but the fact that he was commanded, by law, to produce seed with his new wife, to raise up a child in his dead brother's name. That was Old Covenant law, and we are not under that now. Even if we were, that instance, in actuality, had little to do with birth control; it had to do with being disobedient to God's law.

She might want to familiarize herself with the 5 points above. I also have tons of links and other blog articles on this over in my del.icio.us file.